


The School of Hard Knocks

by Salmon_I



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Lost Decade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:27:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23053201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salmon_I/pseuds/Salmon_I
Summary: He discovers the bunker at Sander’s Auto on a slow day while searching for spare parts he can use. It’s coated in decades of dust and musty from being closed up.  It doesn’t have a shower - but it has electricity.  Desert winter will hit in November, maybe December if he’s lucky.  Previous winters he’d spent plenty of nights wasting gas to run the heater in his truck for an hour, turning it off until it gets too cold to stand and then turning it back on again to keep warm.  He’s lucky both that his natural temperature runs hot and that he's immune to human illness.  Not being able to get sick isn’t the same as not experiencing negative physical side effects from the cold, though.  He’s also noticed his hand aches from it now.He spends his spare time cleaning the bunker.  He splurges on a space heater and a folding cot.  He spends his first winter after high school curled up by that space heater trying out the different alcohols he’d discovered collecting dust in one corner.  Their effect is better when mixed with acetone.  When he’s drunk he can almost forget how rotten life is.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 33





	The School of Hard Knocks

Michael’s hand hurts, but he can’t let a doctor see it, and he can’t let Max heal it. How would he explain a healed hand to Alex? Let alone if Jesse Manes saw it. The pain is severe, and he needs something to dull it or he won’t be able to think of anything else. He’s seventeen, and he can’t buy alcohol legally, but he can buy all the acetone he wants. The money he’s been saving was supposed to go to college supplies, but he can’t live in Albuquerque and keep an eye on Isobel at the same time.

He probably could repair cars or work on the ranches one-handed, especially with the help of his powers, but even the ranchers familiar with him shake their head and tell him to come back next year. He lives in his truck for the rest of the summer, spreading out his college money for food, acetone, and fresh bandages. He showers at the Evans house when he visits Isobel. There’s a sad, haunted look in her eyes when she looks at him sometimes, but it would be worse if she knew the truth so he lets it go. Max struggles with Liz leaving - he’s pretty sure he stops writing. He definitely stops talking to him the way he used to. It seems all their dreams have gone up in flames along with that car. None of them see themselves or each other the same afterward.

* * *

Alex leaves at the end of summer. Michael’s hand is doing better by then. He spends the night parked on Foster Ranch drinking bottle after bottle of acetone anyway. Hoping it will numb the pain in his heart the way it numbs the pain in his hand. Apparently there are some things acetone can’t help with.

* * *

Sanders hires him when he asks for a job at the end of summer. His hand is healed enough that he has some use with it. It’s hurts, though. It spasms sometimes. He drops tools occasionally, and is always in pain at the end of the night. He drinks more acetone, falls asleep in his truck, and is grateful for New Mexico autumn weather. He knows it will be getting colder in a few months, though, and crashing in Max or Isobel’s rooms on the worst nights is no longer an option.

Months of not working while his hand healed has emptied the savings he’d built up for college. Gas for his truck and buying food out - no fridge or stove means he can’t exactly make his own meals - make it hard for him to save up for a down on an apartment. With his relationship with Max strained it’s awkward to borrow the Evans shower. He finds himself heading out to truck stops or occasionally blowing money on a motel room. His truck is probably cleaner than the motels, but his truck doesn’t have a shower.

He discovers the bunker at Sander’s Auto on a slow day while searching for spare parts he can use. It’s coated in decades of dust and musty from being closed up. It doesn’t have a shower - but it has electricity. Desert winter will hit in November, maybe December if he’s lucky. Previous winters he’d spent plenty of nights wasting gas to run the heater in his truck for an hour, turning it off until it gets too cold to stand and then turning it back on again to keep warm. He’s lucky both that his natural temperature runs hot and that he's immune to human illness. Not being able to get sick isn’t the same as not experiencing negative physical side effects from the cold, though. He’s also noticed his hand aches from it now.

He spends his spare time cleaning the bunker. He splurges on a space heater and a folding cot. He spends his first winter after high school curled up by that space heater trying out the different alcohols he’d discovered collecting dust in one corner. Their effect is better when mixed with acetone. When he’s drunk he can almost forget how rotten life is.

* * *

The ranchers are far more willing to hire him once he has two working hands again. He knows a little about gambling from previous summers he’d worked at the ranches. Now that he’s an adult - is eighteen an adult he wonders sometimes - they aren’t holding back. He loses a few wages before learning how to cheat. How to count cards. How to use his powers to rearrange cards to his liking. When he’s back to working for Sanders in the autumn - already planning on spending the winter in the bunker again - one of the ranchhands asks about buying some copper wire under the table. It’s not his to sell, but the money is a larger amount than he could get elsewhere at one time. Sanders is half-blind and never knows how much of anything he has.

Michael can’t legally buy alcohol, but one of the ranchhands makes moonshine. He buys some, mixes it with acetone, and drowns the guilt away. He needs the money more, he tells himself. It doesn’t actually make him feel better.

* * *

When Max joins the Roswell Police Department he offers to pay for online college courses for Michael, but he rejects the idea instantly. He can’t stand the thought of being some charity case to his ex-best friend. Someone too pathetic to stand on his own. Too broken to take care of himself. It’s not like a college degree would do him any good in Roswell. What jobs could he get even if he did have one in the career of his choice - contract work for the military base Jesse Manes all but runs? That wasn’t going to happen. Roswell had three businesses. Ranches, Tourism, and Military. No degree was going to help as long as he was stuck in a town where it wouldn’t make a difference.

He doesn’t need a dead tree to fix cars or work on the ranches. 

There were always college books for sale in second-hand stores and Goodwills. Michael starts to fill the bunker with them as he sits in it at night, devouring all the information he will never get to learn in a UNM classroom. He starts sketching designs and making calculations again. Then he finds a piece of the spaceship one of his nights stargazing at Foster Ranch and that changes everything.

* * *

Isobel wrinkles her nose at his threadbare clothes, and Max looks at him with guilt-filled eyes. He can tease Isobel until she rolls her eyes and mocks his new cowboy hat - there’s nothing he can do about Max. It makes him angry, and frustrated. He doesn’t want his guilt - he wants his best friend back.

He’s saved enough to buy an old airstream from one of the ranchers by the time he’s twenty. The ranchhands take him to the Wild Pony for his twenty-first birthday. He wakes up in the drunk tank, apparently having taken part in a brawl he doesn’t remember much about. Max looks furious with him, no hint of guilt in his gaze this time, and lectures him on drawing attention to himself. It’s not the closeness of nights spent drinking acetone and talking about grades and girls and plans for the future. It’s still the most they’ve interacted in almost four years.

The next time he starts a fight at the Wild Pony, it’s all him. Max glowers and lectures and if this is the new normal, Michael can get used to it.

* * *

The ranchhands only laugh when Michael is late for work because he was in the drunk tank, they don't judge him for it. Plenty of them are late for the same reasons after payday. The ranchers shrug when he’s arrested for gambling. Foster calls it a damn stupid reason for jail time. Sanders tells him not to drink on work nights.

Max lectures, and scowls, and the look in his eyes says he doesn’t understand what’s wrong with him. He pays his bar tab once, and it leads to an argument. Neither of them ever say they're sorry for it. That’s not something they do anymore. Max lectures, Michael mocks him; they argue. They aren’t friends anymore, and Michael begins to wonder if they ever were.

Isobel wrinkles her nose and complains at his choice of bars, and his Cowboy aesthetic, but still invites him to her wedding. She smacks him on the back of the head when he shows up in his cowboy hat. She complains about him getting into trouble, even though she’ll bandage his wounds and bring him acetone. She looks at him like she knows he’s doing this because of a crime he didn’t actually commit. It’s still better than her knowing her own involvement.

The disappointment in both their eyes still stings.

It stings because Max’s jeep was a gift from his adopted parents. And he somehow doesn’t think about the fact that Michael saved up and bought his truck with his own money at sixteen.

It stings because both of them see that he never went to college, not that he’s never been out of work since his hand healed. Max became a cop instead of a writer, and that’s okay. But him being a mechanic is somehow pitiable.

It stings because he didn’t have parents to co-sign vehicle loans or credit cards to build his credit history so that he can have a thirty-year loan on a house neither could afford otherwise. Yet his living in an airstream makes Isobel wrinkle her nose, not thinking about the fact that he was living homeless for three years to save up the money to afford it.

It stings because Max says Roswell is home, and Isobel buries herself in marriage and town events and playing human. Neither of them wants to talk about the past or where they're from or if it’s possible to find out. Which means Michael spending week after week, month after month, year after year, rebuilding the console of their crashed spaceship is an accomplishment that would mean nothing to them. Pages of spaceship designs - later scrapped for new ones that get scrapped for even newer ones when he reads the latest studies on space travel and thermal dynamics - aren’t proof he can present that he’s been doing something with his life.

It stings because he's not low on money because he gambles and drinks and has to pay for speeding tickets. He's broke because three rolls of copper wire only affords him one spaceship part and there's two for sale on the dark web so he spends his wages on the second.

It stings the one time Alex asks him why he never went to college and made a life for himself. Apparently pulling himself up from being homeless and starving isn't an accomplishment worth noting. The following argument ruins their last day of Alex’s leave together and hangs like a bad memory over the start of their next encounter. 

Let me guess, another drunken fight at the Wild Pony, Michael?

You can get another job, Michael.

You’re wasting your life, Guerin.

Acetone and whiskey sting less going down then years of work getting where he is being dismissed by those whose opinions matter the most.

**Author's Note:**

> It’s sad that Michael never went to college because he wanted to go to college. But I kinda hate how the other characters keep acting like Michael is a failure at life because he doesn’t have a house with a white picket fence and dead tree on his wall.
> 
> He was homeless, had no family, and suffered a life changing injury at 17. At 27 he has an airstream, both his bosses that we know of clearly like him, and he's created his own secret lab. That's hardly failing at life.


End file.
